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LXer Weekly Roundup for 18-Apr-2010

This week its all about choosing, switching, installing and migrating to Linux along with the question; Can I be a Windows, Apple, Linux, and Google guy all at once? Also, Microsoft wants to play the Open Source game, why iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Owners should use Linux and why I Want My Daughter to be a Hacker. Enjoy!

Can I be a Windows, Apple, Linux, and Google guy all at once?: I’m having an identity crisis. Regular readers of both this blog and my Education blog will know that I border on being a Google fanboi and Linux tends to work its way into my computer passions as well. I work almost constantly in the cloud and Linux obviously provides a cheap, stable platform for whatever I want to do online. My primary desktop and exclusive web and file server platforms? Ubuntu. Google Apps makes my life easy in my day job and manages virtually all of my communication needs in and out of work. However…

How Canonical Can Do Ubuntu Right: It Isn't a Technical Problem: I knew in advance that venting my frustrations with Ubuntu in the form of an article yesterday would stir up a hornet's nest. [...] So far, with only a very few exceptions, the comments and discussion around my criticism of Ubuntu has been respectful and on topic, even when people strongly disagreed with me. This says something very positive about the Ubuntu community. Having read all the comments I'd like to clarify my thoughts on the subject. First and foremost, with all my criticism of Ubuntu, I am not questioning the competence or the expertise of the developers at Canonical. Far from it. As I pointed out in the article the folks behind Ubuntu have proven they are capable of delivering a quality product. That isn't at issue.

Why iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Owners Should Use Linux: For a long time, using an iPhone with Linux was a complete no go. With a jailbroken phone, you could mount it over a wireless connection using fuse, and then sync music your music that way – but syncing an entire music collection via wifi? No thanks. However, thanks to some rather clever folk, there’s a new solution that gives you access to a whole lot of your iPhone functions on Linux “natively”.

I'm running the Ubuntu 10.04 beta: I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. I needed to get the laptop back into usable shape, and I did that by installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS beta 2. While trying to do an update on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation, well into the third day of the system building everything from source, I stopped that upgrade and tried to do one from packages only. Nope, it didn't work.

Microsoft Plays the Open Source Software Game: Microsoft has been busy these past few days reminding the world that it really is an organization of monstrous proportions and its tendrils reach from the humblest consumer desktop right up to the level of super-computing. Its message is clear: The company has no intention of giving up any of the markets in which it competes to open source operating systems like Linux -- at least not without the mother of all fights.

How to switch your small or home office to Linux: With Linux and free software making a name for itself in the world of big business, many people are testing the feasibility of switching small and home office software to their open source equivalents. Regardless of how you feel about the Linux desktop, this is one area in which Linux can have a real impact, both financially and productively, and any small or home office has the potential to be transformed by just switching one application or two to their open source equivalents.

Are you ready to switch to Linux?: You've heard of Linux but are you ready to make the switch from Windows? Tired of Windows? Ready to look for an alternative? As a desktop user there are really only two options: Linux or Mac OS X. The second pretty much requires that you buy some Apple hardware before you can run it. Linux, on the other hand, will run on most hardware, even some of the older hardware that lurks around homes and offices. Linux is also free to download so you can try it out before having to spend any money.

Linux Foundation Head Says OS Can Be 'Fabulous and Free': Where is Linux headed? That's a question the Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, is focused on as his organization gears up for the Linux Collaboration Summit this week. In Zemlin's view, Linux is strategically placed at the intersection of a number of major IT trends that will serve to bolster adoption of the open source operating system. With the increasing growth of the mobile web and cloud services, Zemlin thinks Linux will end up the big winner.

How to Install Google Go in Ubuntu: What do you get when you mix Python and C? According to Google, it’s Go – a new programming language developed in-house and later open sourced. Go was created by a small team inside Google, including the well known Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and major influence on C. It was created out of a lack of satisfaction with existing languages, mainly the excessively (in the minds of Go’s developers) long compile times needed for other languages. With Go, even a very large and complex application can compile in a few seconds, often less. Additionally, Go has built in concurrency support, so you can code for multiple CPUs without resorting to outside libraries of unknown quality. While we don’t usually cover much programming here at MakeTechEasier, Go is such an interesting language that we just had to dip in a bit, and where better to start than by covering the system setup needed to get Go up and running on your Linux box.

Choosing Open Source Solutions: Part of my job is finding and testing open sourced solutions for already prominent commercially available software. The concept is simple: If it's open sourced, it can be customized, be platform independent, and it can be free. In the business world, this poses two key benefits. Having software that can be customized means fewer problems and more functionality. Getting it for free means lower cost for the services we provide to our customers, and having more money to spend on employees and infrastructure. As simple as this sounds, finding the right fit can be a laborious task of trial and error. Part of my job is minimizing the trial and error.

Inside a Migration: Ms. Z. Arsenault is an IT consultant working in the depths of a large North American energy company. She's one of those brave souls who works away in the background, keeping the servers running, making sure all the pieces fall properly into place so when the employees wander in each morning their applications run as expected. It's often a busy job just keeping things on a steady path. But Ms. Arsenault and her team aren't just maintaining the status quo, they're also trying to improve performance and cut costs while maintaining a stable environment for the end user. This week I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Arsenault about what's she's been up to in the depths of corporate IT.

Why I Want My Daughter to be a Hacker: "Let’s define what I mean by the term “hacker” first. There is so much FUD out there around this term. Large controlling institutions want you to fear hackers, want you to think the hacker mindset is dangerous. This could not be farther from the truth. Hackers are simply empowered individuals that want to figure things out for themselves." ... "1. Hackers are not consumer lemmings – As large institutions continue to brainwash American citizens into becoming slaves to the systems they’ve created"...